Fitzgerald: Voila, deux-rivistes of the world

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the failures at the top in strife-ridden France:

The large-scale presence of Muslims in France, as in other countries of Western Europe, has resulted for Infidels in a world that is far less pleasant, far more expensive, and far more physically insecure than it would be without such a Muslim presence. There is no French non-Muslim who could deny the truth of this assertion. And there are very few who, if asked their real opinion, and if they could give it behind closed doors, would not devoutly wish that the clock could be turned back 40 years, so that large-scale Muslim migration into France had never been permitted.

Such large-scale migration began with the Harkis at the end of the Algerian War; these were the local Arabs and Berbers who had fought on the side of the French, and who were rescued from murderous retribution by being allowed to settle in France in the early 1960s. Then came the boom years, all over Europe. Everywhere Muslims were allowed in to work. In France, they came from North Africa — the maghrebins. At first men came alone to work. Then, because of their antisocial — their criminal — behavior, Giscard d’Estaing accepted the argument that if only they had their families with them, they would quiet down. So families were allowed to join the men. But how many wives came, and how many children came, or were born in France itself, was not something that Giscard d’Estaing had thought much about.

For a while, the numbers were small, and the Islam that remained undeclared in the mental baggage was never completely unpacked. The first generation of immigrants consisted of those eager to leave the hell of the Muslim countries from which they came. They did not quite so easily create those all-Arab or all-Muslim communities, no-go for the Infidels, that required certain numbers, and more than numbers, the attitude to take on the Infidel authorities. When mosques and madrasas were built, often with money supplied by Arabs from abroad, when a whole network of Arabic-language radio and television stations were established, and are now supplemented by satellite television, this made it easier to create a self-contained Muslim environment, naturally hostile to the Infidels who, in the case of this circumambient incidental France, were the incidental French. Now millions of Muslims can be geographically in France, but not of France. And they do not want to be “of France” because France is currently run by Infidels. Its laws, its customs, its manners, are those of the Infidels. This is not right. This is contra naturam. The world ultimately belongs to Allah, and therefore to those, and those only, who accept the message of the Prophet. All others are usurpers, and eventually will be removed from power — they are merely temporarily powerful, in Europe in what is still Dar al-Harb. It will not require military conquest from without: Da’wa and demographic conquest from within will eventually allow Islam to dominate, and Muslims to rule. It is only right, it is only just.

Nowadays, of course, there is no such need for such unskilled workers, inculcated with hostility toward the French authorities, toward the authority of the Infidel nation-state and toward its Infidel people. The aggression and hostility, the indifference to study, the belief that Infidels should support them (which is more rooted a belief than the mere desire, in any situation where benefits can be obtained, of some recipients to exploit whatever is there to be exploited). Inshallah-fatalism and sheer unwillingness to work (what Saudis, what Kuwaitis, what rich members of the Emirates put in more than 2 taxing hours a day?) explain the miserable performance of Arab and Muslim oil states, the states and peoples that have been the beneficiaries of the largest transfer of wealth in human history — some $10 trillion since 1973 — and yet have failed in every case to create modern economies (the Shopping Mall that is Dubai does not count), but instead rely on foreign wage-slaves for almost everything. And the same inshallah-fatalism and the same conviction that Infidels have a duty to support Muslims, and that what is infuriating is not Muslim “poverty” so much as is the failure of Muslims as yet to assume their rightful place, as Islam insists, as those who should dominate, should possess the power and wealth even of, or perhaps especially of, the countries still being run by Infidels. The integration of all others, including black but non-Muslim Africans and immigrants from the Caribbean, and once-impoverished Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants, undercuts the insistence that Muslim economic underperformance is the result of French indifference. It is hard to integrate people whose attitude is one of inculcated hostility, and a sneering theoretical superiority (as Muslims) to their Infidel surroundings that, of course, makes their fury at having to learn or mimic or yield to Infidel laws and manners and ways even more maddening. Why should Muslims, those who by right should be ruling, have to yield or adjust in any way to Infidels, wherever those Infidels may be? And even the most successful, most seemingly integrated, among the Muslim immigrants turn out, when one examines their views, to reflect attitudes that suggest that many or most of them continue to owe their allegiance to the umma al-islamiyya, the Community of Believers, and not to their fellow Infidel citizens. Surely the failure of Muslim states to create economies from the most fabulous unearned wealth in history tells us someting about inshallah-fatalism, lack of industry, lack of motivation.

Surely the failure of Muslims not only in France, but everywhere in Western Europe where the welfare state offers means of support, to perform even close to the level of all other immigrant groups, should suggest that the problem lies in Islam itself, its tenets, and the attitudes and atmospherics it naturally gives rise to. This is what Sarkozy and others, seen as comparatively resolute(and compared to that former Howard Johnson’s soda jerk, Chirac, or the comical D. de V., who would not seem resolute?) are unable to see, unable even to discuss: what it is about Islam that explains the behavior, the performance, the attitudes of Muslims not only in France, but everwhere in the Bilad al-kufr, the Lands of the Infidels.

For 1350 years the Jizyah demanded of non-Muslims supported the Muslim state; slaves seized from various Infidel populations were also a source of labor, of wealth, of soldiers. Even today, if one looks closely, one can see under the surface of things a disguised “jizyah” — that is, a payment forcibly extracted from the Infidels for the benefit of Muslims. In Malaysia, where the population is half-Muslim, it is the non-Muslim Chinese and Indians who are forced to share the fruits of their industry and entrepreneurial activity with the less successful Muslim Malays. This “Bumiputra” system, whereby Muslims must be brought into all non-Muslim enterprises, is one example of the disguised jizyah. So to are the many billions in foreign aid from Infidel countries that is lavished upon all those Araband Muslim states that happen not to possess oil wealth. No matter how hostile these recipients remain, or how even more hostile they become, they continue to receive such aid because the Infidel donors are terrified of what might happen if they cut off such aid. But they haven’t thought it through. What, after all, would Egypt, that center of anti-Americanism and antisemitism, do to the United States that it is not already doing, if the $60 billion sent so far were not to be added to by the American taxpayers? What would or could the “Palestinian” Authority do? What could Pakistan, whose national hero is the sinister Dr. A. Q. Khan, do if the Americans ceased to supply them with debt relief, favorable trade treatment, and military equipment at concessionary prices?

In the countries conquered by Muslims, non-Muslims could live and even practice their religion so long as they fulfilled a number of onerous conditions, including payment of the Jizyah. If they ceased to pay, they lost all their rights, and became fair game. Something like that attitude appears to have affected the Infidel countries of Western Europe and North America, in their fear of cutting off all such aid to those who, as a matter of belief, must regard them with permanent hostility, and worse.

Today, in France, there is no attempt as yet to shut off all sources of future Muslim population growth, for fear of offending the North African states that may, as members of the Francophone nations, offer a little boost to French pride, but otherwise are an economic, diplomatic, and political drag, and ultimately menace, to France. Should from now on the French ever need outside workers again, they must never again go to the Maghreb for such workers. The real cost of the maghrebins, if properly internalized, is too high. Instead, should workers be needed, they can be imported from Eastern Europe or Russia, or China or the Philippines or Latin America. And with black African Christians, or Caribbean blacks, the French experience has been clear: people with the blackest skins, if not Muslim, are able to integrate into French society without difficulty, while the Arabs and Muslims, no matter how light their skin, are far more difficult to mold into loyal citizens of France. If workers are now readily aviailable from non-Muslim countries to meet any new needs, this will make it easier for the French government to now repatriate all those Muslims who have not yet attained citizenship. They have no moral or other claim to French citizenship. Their presence is, for those who see clearly, a present and a growing future threat to France and to its non-Muslim population. Why should that population be forced, for an abstraction, to endure a threat that can only grow? The real price of the Muslim immigrants in France — the price paid in social peace, the price paid in monitoring their mosques, their madrasas, their movements, the price paid in supporting their deliberately gigantic families, the price paid in repairing or replacing what they destroy or torch to teach the “French a lesson” — that price far outweights any imaginary advantage to France and French foreign policy in the Arab countries. The French still continue to pay the same market price for oil and gas that everyone else, even the United States, has to pay. But that, of course, is not something that those who have as individuals been the recipients of favors, of business contracts, of bribes, as “recyclers of petrodollars,” wish the French public to know about.

The French do not in any way need the goodwill of any Arab or Muslim state. There is nothing that the Maghreb supplies that cnanot be supplied elsewhere, even if Tunisian dates are considered preferable to those from California. It is possible to diminish the air and boat traffic between one “rive” or bank of the Mediterranean and the other “rive” so that the vast illegal migration will be brought under control or stopped altogether, even as illegal immigrants, or all those deemed more likely to constitute a security threat are, as a first step, sent back to their countries of origin. And since France’s economy is now static, the more money that is needed to insure the social peace of those whose inshallah-fatalism and attitude that not the world, but the world of Infidels — the very people whom their belief-system teaches them to hate — owes them a living, the more that will have to come from the pockets of those same deplorable Infidels. And the Muslim presence in the state schools is now cause for permanent disruption of ministerial curricula (we won’t read Voltaire, or Racine; we won’t study the Holocaust or French history), and of classroom and schoolyard discipline. And that, in turn, causes the same French taxpayers to remove their children from public schools, and have to endure the added expense of private schools. And that, in turn, will make the native French non-Muslims, who themselves may have had to endure the aggression and violence of Muslim classmates, will in their own life-plans factor in the new cost of raising children in France, which rises as the need for private schools rises. And that, in turn, may cause the French non-Muslim birth rate to plunge even more. And so the Muslim proportion of the population rises, not only because of the large Muslim families, but because the expense of those families on the state, and effect on French public schools, necessarily act to shrink further the non-Muslim proportion of the population.

The French, the well-connected and carefully schooled rulers, and the ruled, both for a long time remained carefully uninterested in what Islam teaches, or what arises naturally from the tenets of Islam, to form what might be called the attitudes and atmospherics of a Muslim community. And then there is the matter of personal gain, which has caused so many to forget other allegiances in the rush to recycle petrodollars for their own benefit and that of their friends, their circle, those like them. Chirac over many years has been the recipient of many favors from various Arab tycoons and tyrants, including the late Rafik Hariri, who brought him nice presents and remembered him in other ways, and the soon-to-be-late Saddam Hussein. Rumors of a Parisian version of the Kniphausen Hawk, a jewel-encrusted falcon, one of only two commissioned by some Arabs, made by some master craftsmen (perhaps Cartier knows something about this) with one of them delivered to a French contractor with extensive interests in the Middle East, and the other, it is said, to Jacques Chirac himself (this would have been about 25 years ago), might help explain Chirac’s behavior. His rumored recreations must run into money. As for the preening poseur and poetaster Dominique de Villepin, to date the funniest part of his routine is when he reads a speech in Cairo or Damascus or somewhere else in an Arab country, and in attempting to make the appropriate allusion, somehow mixes up the great Persian poet Hafiz with the “Palestinian” propagandist Mahmoud Darwish, and then just for ecumenical fun, throws in Maimonides. He, D. de V., may see himself as a blend of Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Malraux, and most likely St.-John Perse. Others will think of Sacha Guitry at his silliest. As for as these statesmen’s performance over the last few days — one suspects Annette Funicello could have done better.

Even Nicolas Sarkozy, who by comparison with Chirac and D. de V., appears to be a giant in the earth, has not yet gone far enough in his own understanding of Islam. Neither he nor others in his camp understand as yet the immutability of the canonical Islamic texts (so that no “reformation” of Islam is possible), nor have they realized that Infidels have no way to detect the real “moderate” from the feigning one. They do not understand that even the “moderate” Muslim, precisely because of his outward affability and seeming reasonableness, may help promote the Jihad by confusing Infidels, or delaying their own thorough comprehension of the matter. They do not understand, finally, that any “moderate” can metamorphose at any time in the future, for any reason, into an “immoderate” Muslim — or for that matter, have children or grandchildren who will, out of all sorts of impulses, reasons, or setbacks, revert to the real, full-bodied Islam that remains a permanent menace to world civilization.

Sarkozy continues to speak as if he still believes in government-funded mosques instead of mosques that get no government funding, and are not permitted to get Saudi or other outside funding, and that are strictly monitored and closed if found to contain false papers, explosives, and hate-Infidel propaganda, or to preach hatred of the Infidels. And what is Islam without the strict division of the world between Believer and Infidel, and the hostility, or even murderous hatred, the former must necessarily have for the latter?

And yet for all his ignorance one must be grateful for Sarkozy. He gave Tariq Ramadan a television thrashing, and he is the only one who may help to save France. He, and such writers and journalists as Anne-Marie Delcambre, and Jean-Louis Brugiere, and Alexandre del Valle, and Yvan Rioufol, and Bat Ye’or, and a handful of others.

There is no one currently in politics, save possibly for the unacceptable Le Pen and Megret, who dares to articulate the problem. Everyone is waiting. Who will do it? Who will admit that the French establishment, the French elites enjoying their lunches at Arpege, have done terrible things to France and to the people of France, in their immigration policy, in their Euro-Arab Dialogue, in their mad pursuit of an impossible identity of interest between “les deux rives” of the Mediterranean?

In the 1930s, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland. The French army at the time was the equal of the German army, and had it taken a stand, had it marched, things later might have been headed off, and the world had been different. But all sorts of things had happened. A particularly gifted French minister, who took Hitler’s measure early, had been assassinated in 1934 when an attempt was made on the life of the Serbian king. The government of Leon Blum was under constant attack from the right; even the Assemblee Nationale had been attacked by cagoulards. Strong measures were not to be taken.

It is now time to wake up, and no army of occupation will march in to arouse citizens to their duty. The whole thing is different, insidious, slow, and there is always at the ready some slightly plausible explanation or justification that allows for temporizing — until it is too late. During that other Occupation, the German one, the more obvious one, employees of the Musee de l’homme at Trocadero, many of them immigrants, proved themselves ready to die for France, instead of working to destroy it. There is a plaque to Boris Vilde and other Russian Jewish immigrants, morts pour la France, somewhere at Trocadero — unless the Muslim rioters and vandals have torn it down. There are those who can become French, despite everything that is done to them, and those who cannot become French, despite everything that is done for them.

And now France itself appears to be slowly coming unhinged. Voila, deux-rivistes of the world. The riots, the arson and other attacks all over France are the world you have made. There it is, messieurs et mesdames, voila la France out of its depth, and in too deep. But who needs La Fontaine, or the pride of France, the dictee, as long as the oil flows, the petrodollars are recycled to the right swine, and everyone continues to bear burnt offerings — cars, houses, schools, a civilization — to the untouchable and implacable Idols of the Age, those Articles of Faith about tolerance, diversity, what is thinkable and what “unthinkable,” which were only creations of fallible humans in the first place.

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